


Feast of Lights

by yugto



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Gen, Hanukkah, Holidays, Team Bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-17
Updated: 2014-12-17
Packaged: 2018-02-28 01:34:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2714072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yugto/pseuds/yugto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“And long story short, Johnson—you’ve heard of Johnson, right, he was the goalie before you got here—he was like ‘What if we celebrate Hanukkah this year, dudes... It’d be nice for Zimmermann, and it’d be cool to show some religious diversity to the readers, y’know?’ and none of us really understood what he meant, but we went ahead and tried anyway,” Ransom concluded. “We’re not the most orthodox of celebrants, but it’s become a Haus tradition.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Feast of Lights

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Archexile](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Archexile/gifts).



> Archexile requested Hanukkah fic for their 'Swawesome Santa gift, so I did my best to deliver! Fair warning that I am not actually Jewish, and any mistakes and/or factual inaccuracies herein are completely my bad.
> 
> Happy second day of Hanukkah, Archexile! I hope you like your gift!

There were absolutely no Christmas decorations in the Haus.

On a normal day, this fact wouldn’t have fazed Chowder. The Haus wasn’t ordinarily overly decorated (unless it was the day after a particularly large party, and then red cups and various pairs of underwear would decorate the living room). However, it was the afternoon of December sixteenth, which meant there were only nine days left until Christmas, which _meant_ it was prime time to start setting up one’s Christmas decorations. As someone whose family traditionally set up their Christmas tree on Black Friday, and someone who had begun listening to Christmas music on the day after Thanksgiving (much to his neighbors’ chagrin), Chowder was left very confused. In fact, the lack of Christmas decorations left him in a temporary state of shock. How could he not have noticed this beforehand?

Like, of course he’d been in the Haus recently! No self-respecting member of the Samwell men’s hockey team would go long without making the trek down to the Haus, even if it was only to grab one of Bitty’s mini-pies. In fact, he clearly remembered the last time he’d been there: there had been a big party last week to herald the start of The Week Before Finals Week (not-so-fondly known as “Dead Week” by the upperclassmen), which Shitty had thrown purely for the purpose of getting wasted one last time before all of them had to buckle down and start studying for their finals. The majority of the Haus had already been dark by the time Chowder arrived, and when he stumbled into the relatively well-lit kitchen, he’d been more preoccupied with trying not to fall on his face after finishing a kegster. Or maybe it had been two kegsters? All right, so maybe his memory wasn’t so clear.

Dex and Nursey, both seemingly unaffected by the lack of decorations, pushed past Chowder and into the Haus, starting up an argument about something or other along the way. Chowder stood there for a minute more, trying to figure out why he’d been asked to bring his Christmas gifts for everyone if the Haus wasn’t even decorated for a Christmas party yet. Maybe that job was going to be pushed off on him and Dex and Nursey?

In the midst of his musings, the faint strains of music caught his ear. He followed the tune to the living room, where Shitty and Lardo were curled up on the extremely questionable couch under a faded gray fleece blanket, watching something on the television. Shitty’s left arm was wrapped around Lardo’s shoulders, his hand snaking its way around to the bowl of popcorn Lardo cradled in her arms.

“I thought you guys had finals to study for?” Chowder asked. Finals were set to end that Friday, and he and Dex had been studying for their computer science final for the past week and a half. He didn’t even want to think about how much time he had spent studying for his other finals; after everything he had experienced this week, he now knew that the upperclassmen called it “Dead Week” for a reason. Seeing a senior and a junior curled up on the couch during Dead Week, watching a _musical_ , of all things, was not exactly doing wonders for his will to study.

“We’re de-stressing. What good is a holiday if you can’t take a little break from life?” Shitty proclaimed with a grand, one-armed gesture, as the people on the TV bellowed, “Tradition! Tradition!” Judging by the faint smell hanging around the two upperclassmen on the couch, Chowder had a feeling they had already been de-stressing with something that might possibly have been illegal. It didn’t seem to have affected them all that much; Lardo was still alert enough to smack Shitty’s other hand away from the popcorn, taking a handful for herself.

“Holiday?” Nursey questioned, walking into the room with Dex close on his heels. “What holiday is happening tonight? It’s still nine days to Christmas, but Bitty’s making pie already.”

“Not that Bitty making pie is anything out of the ordinary, but there’s _so much food_ on the counter and Jack just glared at us until we left the kitchen,” Dex added.

“Like, is it someone’s birthday, or what?” Nursey asked, completely ignoring Dex. Dex let out a small, frustrated noise, which was almost completely drowned out by a clattering noise on the stairs. Seconds later, as if summoned by the frogs’ questions, Ransom and Holster popped out of nowhere with—”Whoa, is that a whiteboard?” Chowder asked, eyes wide.

“Where did you even get that?” Dex scowled, still a little bit affronted.

“All right, frogs, sit your asses down and get ready to be educated,” Holster boomed. Shitty picked up the remote and paused the movie, and he and Lardo settled back onto the couch to watch Ransom and Holster’s presentation. “It’s time for... Hockey Shit with Ransom and Holster!”

“Did I hear a theme song just now?” Nursey asked, blinking slowly once, twice, like he wasn’t sure if he wanted to know the answer.

“You see, frogs,” Ransom steamrollered over Nursey’s question, “this tradition started way back when our esteemed captain Jack Zimmermann was but a child, a mere sophomore Wellie—”

“This was when we were just baby frogs like you, by the way,” Holster interjected.

“—Someone asked him what he was gonna get Bad Bob for Christmas, and he said ‘well, we don’t celebrate Christmas’,” Ransom continued, not even fazed by the interruption.

Holster picked up the thread, “And everyone was like ‘bro, what do you mean, you don’t do Christmas’, and he said ‘I’m Jewish’, and we were all like ‘Ooooooooooooh’.”

“And long story short, Johnson—you’ve heard of Johnson, right, he was the goalie before you got here—he was like ‘What if we celebrate Hanukkah this year, dudes... It’d be nice for Zimmermann, and it’d be cool to show some religious diversity to the readers, y’know?’ and none of us really understood what he meant, but we went ahead and tried anyway,” Ransom concluded. “We’re not the most orthodox of celebrants, but it’s become a Haus tradition.”

“And tonight’s the first night of Hanukkah,” Lardo piped up from her perch on the couch. “We don’t celebrate every night together, but we always try to at least celebrate the first night together.” Leaning forward, she snatched up the remote and pressed play. The village’s residents resumed singing about their traditions, and Lardo and Shitty turned their attention away from the frogs and back toward the movie.

“So get ready for the best first Hanukkah of your lives,” Holster concluded theatrically. With that parting shot, he and Ransom vanished up the stairs with a flourish, the whiteboard clattering noisily behind them.

The three freshmen were left blinking and bemused in Ransom and Holster’s wake for a moment before Nursey mumbled, “Wait, isn’t this the only first Hanukkah of our lives?” and Chowder exclaimed “Whoa, that’s _so cool_!!!”

* * *

 

In the kitchen, several steaming plates of food sat on the counter, ready to be brought out and put on the table. A frying pan sizzled on the stove, a platter heaped high with latkes stationed inches away. Ingredients were scattered around in places where Bitty hadn’t quite gotten around to putting them away yet, preoccupied as he was with the four different things he had cooking at once.

In the midst of this culinary chaos, the timer on the old oven dinged, and Bitty raced across the room to peer through the oven door. Inside the oven sat a pecan pie, steaming slightly and filling the kitchen with the delicious scent of pie.

“Bittle,” said Jack, a slightly amused tint to his voice, “you do know that pecan pie isn’t a Hanukkah food, right.”

“Jack Laurent Zimmermann, I have fried so many things this morning, I deserve to make at least one pie,” Bitty huffed, squinting at his pie and trying to determine if the crust was just the right shade of golden-brown. Dex and Nursey poked their heads in while Bitty’s back was turned, both hungrily eyeing the food on the counter; Jack affixed them with his best captainly glare until they shrugged and backed away from the doorway, and turned back just in time to see the way Bitty’s face lit up when he removed his pecan pie from the oven. He supposed that seeing Bitty—uh, one of his teammates that happy was well worth the break with tradition.

“Well, there’s quite a bit of protein in those fried foods, you know,” Jack pointed out, a slow smile creeping its way over his face. A similar smile flickered at the corner of Bitty’s lips for a moment before he rolled his eyes and grumbled, “Are you casting aspersions on my diet _again_ , Jack? Goodness _gracious_ , I thought we would have been over this by now. Don’t make me kick you out of my kitchen.”

“ _Our_ kitchen,” Jack corrected, obligingly backing away from the counter as Bitty fussed over his pie. Outside, Holster bellowed something that sounded vaguely like the beginning of one of his and Ransom’s trademarked “Hockey Shit” explanations. “Should I, uh. Should I get some guys to set the table?”

“Yeah, that’d be great!” Bitty beamed.

Ignoring the weird swooping feeling in his stomach that Bitty’s smile gave him, Jack shouldered the kitchen door open and went off to find some people to help set the table.

* * *

Twenty-three hockey players gathered by the front window of the Haus as Jack stepped up to the windowsill and, using a cigarette lighter that Shitty handed to him with great ceremony, carefully lit a candle on the menorah. Bowing his head, Jack recited a set of prayers; although their captain’s words were incomprehensible to the rest of the team, they bowed their heads along with him in an uncharacteristically silent display of respect.

The prayers came to a close, and Jack lit the first candle on the right. The menorah burned brightly in the window as the hockey team trooped back into the dining room.

“Time for chow!” someone bellowed. The team set upon the food as if they hadn’t eaten in ages, demolishing Bitty’s hard work in the space of half an hour. The pie, which came out at the very end of the meal, was wiped out within ten minutes of its appearance on the table.

Full and sleepy, the hockey team moved to the living room floor, where they situated themselves in a rough approximation of a circle. “Aw yeah, time for my favorite part of the night,” Shitty whooped, as Jack pulled a squarish top out of a box.

“Jack, you gotta tell our frogs what’s happening here!”

Chowder scooted closer to Jack, Dex and Nursey close behind him, as Jack picked up the dreidel and held it out to them. Pointing to the side of the dreidel marked נ, Jack explained, “This is _Nun_. If the dreidel lands with this side facing up, nothing happens to you. This is _Gimmel_ ,” he continued, pointing to the side marked ג. “Getting that means you take everything in the pot. This one’s _Hey_ —” he turned the dreidel over in his hands and tapped the ה with his index finger—“and it means you take half of what’s in the pot. This last one here is _Shin_.” Showing the frogs the side emblazoned with a ש, he concluded, “And if you get that one, you have to put everything you’ve got in the pot.”

“What are we betting with?” Dex asked. “I don’t know if I’ve got enough on me to do any gambling.”

“No worries, man. We play with these,” Shitty declared, holding up a bag of chocolate _gelt_ coins. “Here, everybody, take one—all right, now, _we begin_.”

Shitty and Lardo promptly proceeded to slay everyone—“ _How can you win so consistently in a game of_ luck _?_ ” Holster cried out, anguished, after Lardo spun _Gimmel_ for the fifth time in a row—but, after a lot of begging from the frogs (mostly Chowder) and impassioned appeals to the better part of their hearts (mostly Ransom and Holster), the two winners were convinced to share their spoils with the rest of the team.

“Don’t eat _all_ of those, y’all,” Bitty scolded, just as Lardo popped a handful of coins into her mouth. “How are we supposed to play again tomorrow night if you’ve eaten all the coins?”

“Chill, Bits,” Shitty said through a mouthful of chocolate. “I can pick some up at the Stop and Shop tomorrow after my first exam.”

“Don’t get killed,” Dex mumbled, reaching out to take a few coins for himself. He’d heard _things_ about the “Murder Stop and Shop”.

“Brah, it’s cool,” Shitty drawled.

“Anyone up for another round?” asked Lardo, reaching out to pick up the dreidel. She was answered with the sound of snores; half of the team had fallen asleep, leaning against walls and couches and, in Ransom and Holster’s case, each other. “Guess not,” she said wryly, and stood up. “Okay, boys, let’s get cleaning.”

* * *

“This was totally _‘swawesome_!” Chowder cheered, following Jack and Bitty into the kitchen with a stack of dirty plates in his arms. “And it goes on for seven more nights?! That’s so cool!! Do you think we can do this again next year, Bitty?”

“Gosh, I dunno, Chowder,” Bitty replied, sneaking a quick glance at Jack. “I mean, Jack won’t be here anymore, so—”

“I’ll come back just for this,” Jack said, and whoa, was that a _smile_ on Jack’s face? Chowder didn’t think he’d ever seen a sight like that before, except for maybe during Hazeapalooza, but his memories of that were kind of hazy. No pun intended.

“Well, you heard the man,” Bitty grinned. “It looks like we’ll be doing this next year, too.”

“ _’Swawesome_!” Chowder cheered again.


End file.
